For their fifth album -- also their first with only five members, after guitarist Gerry Cott left; hence the name - the Boomtown Rats started integrating their impulses into the most representative album they ever did. In sheer terms of songwriting, the results you'd get by paring everything down to vocals and simple guitar, I'd probably also grade it as their weakest (ignoring the debut), which makes it an ideal place to examine what, exactly, I find so consistently brilliant about their output.

Their strength was not, precisely, originality. The Rats were always with their time, not in front of it. Simon Crowe's polyrhythmic, multitracked, multiethnic, layered drum parts on V DEEP were even more sophisticated and danceable than on MONDO BONGO, but Talking Heads had hired a slew of African drummers to do something roughly equivalent on REMAIN IN LIGHT two years earlier, and King Sunny Ade's Nigerian juju music was then topping critics' lists and being purchased by hundreds of thousands of future Starbucks patrons. V DEEP explored electronic textures playfully at the start of "Talking In Code", but the song proper's sounds weren't far removed from Siouxsie's Banshees crossed with "Stayin' Alive". "Never In A Million Years"'s synth anticipated "Born In The USA" by a mere two years, while "a Storm Breaks" and "Skin On Skin" were akin to Georgio Moroder's darkest versions of disco. "Skin…"'s rap section came a year after Blondie's "Rapture" topped charts. "House On Fire" was warm reggae, in time for the first Rats' album after Bob Marley's sad death. Gerry Roberts's restrained-by-polish guitar heroics would fit a Pat Benatar album. "The Bitter End" and "Charmed Lives", in their untutored swooping melodics and ravaged moments of starkness, may have influenced the next two Midnight Oil albums, though given V DEEP's sales I wouldn't bet on it. The peppy Mexican horn breaks of "Storm…", "Charmed…", and "House…" make an interesting mix with the rest of the music, especially given the New Orleans piano of "Storm…", but aren't exactly avant-garde. Neither are the sixties spy music of "Whitehall 1212" or the finger-snapping cool jazz of "the Little Death".

In the Rats' favor, though, were four huge factors. One is Bob Geldof's singing. Not a natural singer, and stuck with a gruff, impish, slightly nasal voice, he made up for everything with his expressiveness. The just-out-of-bed yawn/growl on "Skin…"s rap gives full conviction to the unfocused creepiness of lines about "where's the riot/ it's much too quiet" and "tonight I go to sleep with the lullaby sound of buildings falling down", while extreme automated echo enhances the panic in the yelped chorus. "Charmed Lives"'s too-obvious jab at rich people ("we're wonderful. Hear the news, it's all grief and gloom/ things are bad, really bad, we're clearly immune") is made fun by his playground singsong sneer, with a group-sung hook of "Na na na na na na na na". For "He Watches It All", a thoughtfully oblique song about a media titan, Geldof focuses on delivering the winding Costello-ite melody as accurately as possible, but on "Never…" anti-military protest, elegant enough to allow a similar treatment, he sacrifices a little tuneful precision for volume. His backup singers, though even less born for the job, give similar support, their slow "oooh"s artificially panned in and out on the abstract ominousness of "a Storm Breaks", but their gang-up enthusiasm helping the joyous sprint though "He Watches…"'s bridge of "Did you read in the Sunday paper?/ Headline called him 'the Sailor's Deacon'/ fell in love with a lighthouse keeper/ now he's bringing home the beacon".

Virtue #2, simply, is the sturdiness of Geldof's frequently ambitious melodies. #3 is general literacy, as even trivial topics are delivered with style. "House…"'s jungle-commune fantasy casually tosses off lines about "bony Watusi fingers beating on the bark of a tree" and "executing loop-da-loops takes a lot of skill and bad taste". "Talking…"s probably one-sided complaint about his girlfriend's indecisiveness does deliver the venom with accuracy: "toss me a code/ astonish me, dear, with a new point of view/ well I like you I think/ it varies sometimes and it really depends". At best, of course, literacy yields songs like the anti-heroin "Little Death", whose "There's a man over there, he's got cold feet/ he'd march to the drum, but the drummer's dead beat/ he's fragile tonight, but he says he's clean/ he's uncertain when he's speaking, but he knows what he means/ he's shiverin' now but he don't look cold/ he says 'turn up the weather', so I do as I'm told" has also become my lyric of choice to sing to the tune of "You Shook Me All Night Long".

Better than any other group I've encountered, though, the Boomtown Rats strike me as having been masters of structure and detail. Not only were vocal inflections and interlocking rhythms perfect to the last detail. You could also count on lots of little fluttery hooks that lasted less than a measure; on slow tension buildups that dissolved into giddiness just before they went from tense to unpleasant; on experimental intros being overtaken by driving, authoritative rhythms. It must, in part, be simple correspondence between their instinctive sense of pacing and mine; by their own account, V DEEP and MONDO BONGO were created in highly relaxed circumstances, not intense slavery. Nonetheless, there's objective effort going on.

One of pop music's dirty little secrets is how completely vulnerable it would be to the attentions of one of Frederick Taylor's old time-study men, reworking industry by breaking each task to its smallest components and teaching human beings to put the components together with zero waste or slack (pain and suffering not being defined as "waste" for industrial purposes). Pop is intensely repetitive: identical choruses three times in the same song and often using repetition internally; one verse using the same melody as another; drum patterns repeated for minutes on end. Cut down a song to its building blocks and very few would exceed thirty seconds. The repetition, of course, has all sorts of uses. There's the beneficial brainwashing in which good tunes go from puzzling novelties to familiar to precious. There's the chance to learn and sing along; the pleasure of anticipating correctly. To lose those benefits is to take intellectual purity over the happiness of your hoped-for audience… and yet the right amount of repetition for one person can bore another would-be fan completely. The Boomtown Rats understood, at an unusual level of insight, the importance of having repetitions, yet varying each on multiple levels, so every trip through the familiar could yield new insight. And still be fun to air-guitar to.